“Every once in a while,” says Megan Garber, “a show will break out of the comfortable paradigm to engage in something much more productive than comfort alone—every once in a while, a primetime network sitcom will double as an urgent argument about the way we live now and the way we might live better. Black-ish, on ABC, offers episodes like that as a matter of course, and the show’s Season 4 premiere, ‘Juneteenth: The Musical,’ is the most powerful breakout so far. Tuesday evening’s Black-ish is, as its title suggests, largely a musical episode, inspired in turns by Hamilton and Schoolhouse Rock! It is also, as its title further suggests, a consideration of a holiday that is not (yet) nationally celebrated—and, in that, also a meditation on cultural memory and national apology and monuments and flags and kneeling and history as something that is both shared among all Americans and extremely biased in its vision.”
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TOPICS: ABC, Black-ish, African Americans and TV, TV Musicals